DistroWatch Weekly

A weekly opinion column and a summary of events from the distribution world

DistroWatch Weekly

DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 472, 3 September 2012

Welcome to this year's 36th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Kororaa Linux has emerged as one of the most user-friendly Fedora-based distributions available today. With a large number of excellent tweaks and enhancements, it is sometimes compared to Linux Mint of the Debian world. Jesse Smith investigates the project's latest release, version 17, to see what new improvements have been added to the system and its KDE desktop. In the news section, OpenIndiana project leader Alasdair Lumsden resigns citing disappointment over events that have led to the increasing irrelevance of the distribution, Jörg Schilling restarts the development of SchilliX by returning to the OpenSolaris code base, Ubuntu announces a new official flavour featuring a vanilla GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell desktop, and Fedora developers postpone the alpha release of version 18 by another week. Also in this issue, don't miss a useful set of scripts for a more efficient and less power-hungry home server in the Tips and Tricks section. Finally, we are happy to announce that the recipient of the August 2012 DistroWatch.com donation is the cherrytree project. Happy reading!

Kororaa Linux is a distribution headed by developer Chris Smart. The project is based on Fedora and builds upon the Fedora base, adding tweaks, packages and repositories which are likely to appeal to end users. For example, Kororaa comes with multimedia support, easier access to third-party hardware drivers and comes with popular repositories enabled, saving users from hunting down software packages (like Flash) manually. The distro comes in two flavours, GNOME and KDE, and both editions are available in both 32-bit and 64-bit builds. The sizes of the individual builds vary a little, but the ISO images are all around 1.5 GB. For my test run with Kororaa 17 "Bubbles" I decided to try the KDE edition.

Booting into the Kororaa Linux live environment brings us to a KDE desktop featuring a subtle blue theme. There's an application menu and task switcher positioned at the bottom of the screen and a folder view widget sits on the desktop. In this widget we're presented with three icons, a Help icon (which opens the KDE Help Centre documentation), a launcher for the system installer and a ReadMe icon which opens a short PDF document detailing how to acquire additional drivers and assistance.

As previously mentioned Kororaa Linux is based on the Fedora distribution and so shares the same Anaconda installer. There aren't any surprises here, the system installer asks us to select our keyboard layout, create a hostname for our machine and supply our time zone. Then we set a password for the root account and get walked through partitioning our hard disk. Anaconda supports LVM, RAID and encryption and makes partitioning a fairly straight forward process. We're asked if we would like to install a boot loader, in this case GRUB 2, and then the installer goes to work copying files to our hard drive. Once the installation is complete and we reboot the machine we're presented with a configuration wizard. This series of graphical screens shows us Kororaa's licensing information, prompts us to create a user account and asks us to set the current date & time. We are then handed over to a graphical login screen.

Logging in brings us back to the KDE desktop in its usual classic layout. My first impression was that the interface was a bit slow to respond and it turns out this is because there are a number of things going on in the background. The system is checking for updates, KDE is trying to index files and there are visual effects enabled. Disabling indexing and the desktop effects helped and, after a while, the system finished grabbing repository information and the desktop became more responsive.

Since I mentioned updates, let's talk about those for a moment. Shortly after logging in an icon appeared in the system tray letting me know updated packages were available. Clicking on the icon launched the Apper package manager. The manager shows a list of packages with their names, descriptions, software versions and their sizes. We can mark individual items to be upgraded or not. There were quite a lot of updates available when I first started using Kororaa, around 360 updates totaling over 700MB in size. This may be why, when I clicked Apper's Apply button to begin the update process, Apper started calculating dependencies and then reset itself, bringing me back to the list of available updates. Any attempt to install the waiting packages resulted in being shown the list again.

Next I turned to the YUM command line tool to download the updates. YUM comes with a plugin which allows it to download delta packages, these are smaller packages featuring just the changes required for the operating system rather than the entire updated software bundle and it's a great bandwidth saver. Instead of 700MB of updates I only had to download 330MB of software, thanks to YUM's plugin. That was the good news, the bad news was YUM crashed while applying the updates... or perhaps the OS crashed and YUM went with it because I suddenly found myself with a non-functioning computer. I booted up and tried applying the updates again, this time keeping an eye on its progress to see if a specific package was causing a problem, however this time all the of the available updates applied cleanly.

A little while ago I mentioned the Apper package manager which is available on Kororaa Linux, but because of my problems getting updates through it and the slow pace of that particular graphical front-end, I did most of my installing and removal of software using Yum Extender (YumEx). This third-party graphical package manager has been floating around the Fedora community for a while and it is able to perform more complex tasks faster than the official front-ends. YumEx makes it easy to sort software by its status (available, security update or installed) and we can search for items by name. It also makes tracking queued actions straight forward and provides detailed status reports while it is working. It's good to see YumEx included in the distribution.

Kororaa Linux comes with a pile of useful software and the application menu is quite full. We're provided with Firefox and the browser comes with some extensions pre-installed for us, including one which blocks Flash ads from automatically playing. The KMail e-mail client is available, as are Linphone, the Choqok micro-blogging client, the Blogilo full-sized blogging client and the Konversation instant messaging application. The KTorrent BitTorrent client is installed for us as is the LibreOffice suite. In the multimedia sub-menu we find the Amarok music player, the VLC multimedia player and the K3b disc burning software. Audacity and Kdenlive are featured for multimedia editing and Handbrake is included for transcoding media. We're provided with an e-book reader, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, Inkscape and the digiKam camera software. A few small games are featured as is the Marble desktop globe.

Like its parent, Kororaa Linux comes with a good collection of admin tools for managing user accounts, printers, system services and the firewall. There is also a utility for tweaking SELinux and a very friendly backup app, Back In Time. An app is available for creating live USB bootable media, there are a couple of text editors included, a calculator, an archive manager and the file renaming utility, KRename. We're also provided with privacy and encryption tools through KGpg. Kororaa comes with accessibility options, including a text-to-speech tool, a mouse-click utility and a screen magnifier. The distribution comes with popular media codecs, Java and the GNU Compiler Collection. Flash isn't installed for us, but it is available in the default repositories. Under the hood Kororaa comes with version 3.4 of the Linux kernel and the 3.5 version of the kernel is available in the repositories.

There is a lot of software to be had and it does make for a full menu. However, I found there was very little overlap in functionality. This gives users a great deal of flexibility and means, regardless of the tasks we wish to perform, we're not likely to need to download additional software in order to get to work. The administrative programs are especially helpful and I'm glad Kororaa has kept these as they are one of the highlight's of the parent distro.

I ran Kororaa on my HP laptop (dual-core 2 GHz CPU, 4GB of RAM, Intel video and Intel wireless cards). For the most part, once extra services and effects were turned off, the distribution performed well. All of my hardware was properly detected, my screen was set to its maximum resolution and my wireless card detected networks within range. Audio was muted at first, but adjusting the volume control in the system tray gave me sound. By default KDE was set to not accept taps on my trackpad as mouse clicks, however this behaviour can be changed in the KDE System Settings panel. While sitting idle at the desktop the operating system used around 230MB of memory. When I first installed Kororaa I found my boot times were quite long, over two minutes from power-on to login screen. I mentioned the long boot times to Mr Smart and he correctly diagnosed the problem as coming from GRUB2's configuration which was taking an unusually long time to load themes and images. With the boot loader's themes disabled in GRUB2's configuration file my boot times dropped drastically down to under a minute.

Since Kororaa Linux is built upon the Fedora distribution it seems only natural to compare the two. There are two complaints I generally have when running Fedora. The first is that it comes with software applications which fit a particular desktop environment rather than applications which users will want. The other is that hunting down repositories and packages is a long process on Fedora compared with other distributions due to licensing concerns and sluggish package managers. Kororaa, when we get right down to it, is essentially Fedora with these two concerns addressed. Kororaa comes with more software and, specifically, more software users are likely to want.

The Konqueror web browser has been replaced by Firefox, for example, and VLC has replaced other video players. This reduces the amount of time a new user needs to spend hunting down software packages and makes the environment feel more friendly. In addition, Kororaa comes with several third-party repositories enabled, allowing users to simply open their package manager and find the software they need, rather than manually searching the web for repositories, enabling them and then searching for the package. Kororaa's approach takes the headache out of finding software, or at least most of it. The graphical front-ends for YUM are still quite slow, but at least having YumEx available in the default installation makes up for the waiting by having an attractive and flexible interface.

Packages and management of the same aside, Kororaa does a nice job of being a friendly desktop-oriented operating system. It's cutting-edge, it is responsive and it comes with some great administrative utilities. The KDE edition provides a powerful, flexible desktop with a traditional layout and the distribution is easy to install. Despite some early problems I faced with updates and the boot loader, things got straightened out and Kororaa was, after that first day, a pleasant distribution to run. It's modern, it comes with good software, a manual with a few helpful tips and the interface generally stays out of the way. If you're a fan of Fedora and want to stay on the cutting edge without the hassles that upgrades and fresh installs bring, then Kororaa is a nice, friendly way to achieve that. It is essentially a ready-out-of-the-box desktop edition of Fedora and a welcome member of the Fedora/Red Hat ecosystem.

Ever since Oracle's decision to discontinue the OpenSolaris distribution the company inherited from Sun Microsystems, the developers and contributors to the popular UNIX platform have been searching for a way to continue the project. Many of the coders have found themselves working under the Illumos umbrella, with OpenIndiana emerging as the logical continuation of the OpenSolaris distribution. But not all is well with the project and last week's resignation of OpenIndiana lead developer Alasdair Lumsden highlights some of the conflicts between open-source ideals and commercial interests. The H Online reports in "OpenIndiana project leader steps down": "In Lumsden's opinion, Joyent, Nexenta and Delphix spent too much effort pushing their own distributions of Illumos and only contributed to the core of Illumos, which Lumsden says led to 'the increasing irrelevance of Illumos'. Lumsden also points to the fact that many of the unique features of OpenIndiana are now becoming available on Linux as well. Technologies such as ZFSOnLinux, Btrfs and dtrace are not as mature as their Illumos counterparts yet, but, Lumsden believes, they lead to the OS "becoming less and less important" in comparison with Linux. Taking his leave from all duties on the project, Lumsden says that he will nonetheless continue to provide hosting for OpenIndiana's infrastructure."

In the old days Sun Microsystems' Solaris was the most popular UNIX operating system, but with the growing popularity of Linux at the time, the company was forced to open some of the Solaris code in order to attract more developers and contributors. Thus OpenSolaris was born. The opening of the source code also led to an explosion of OpenSolaris-based distributions, both community and commercial, with various levels of (in)compatibilities between them. To illustrate the complexity, Jörg Schilling, the developer of cdrecord and SchilliX, has emailed DistroWatch to explain the history and relationships between some of the products that evolved from Solaris: "SchilliX is not based on OpenIndiana as OpenIndiana has incompatible IPS packaging. SchilliX uses the native Solaris packaging system. SchilliX is rather based on OpenSolaris, but note that OpenSolaris is not a distribution. The name of the distro you call 'OpenSolaris' is Indiana. And OpenIndiana is based on Indiana and not on Solaris as Solaris is the non-free precursor of OpenSolaris. To be more precise, OpenSolaris is the 'open' Solaris base. The development code name for Solaris 10.1 (renamed to Solaris 11 at the end of 2005) is 'Nevada' and the source base (that is similar to what FreeBSD covers with their code base) is called 'ON' (Operating and Networking). Before Oracle launched their recent closed-source fork from OpenSolaris, the OpenSolaris base was called 'ONNV' by Sun. ONNV in an abbreviation for 'Operating and Networking Nevada'. SchilliX-ON is a continuation project for that code base and SchilliX is based on SchilliX-ON."

* * * * *

It seems that the growing "ecosystem" of official Ubuntu projects is about to expand by another member. Initially named "GNOMEbuntu", the new Ubuntu flavour will come with a vanilla GNOME 3 desktop and GNOME Shell, rather than Unity. OMG! Ubuntu!'s Joey Sneddon writes in "GNOME-flavoured Ubuntu Spin Coming October 18th": "'GNOMEbuntu', to be based on Ubuntu 12.10, will be released on October 18th - the same day that Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu all release their latest versions. GNOMEbuntu aims to provide as much of a 'vanilla' GNOME experience as possible whilst also keeping various elements from Ubuntu. After all it is an Ubuntu-based spin. GNOME Shell is provided as the default desktop, and GDM -- which sports new fancy pants animations in 3.6 -- is to be used for the lock and login screens. File-manager wise the spin will use the same version of Nautilus as Ubuntu. Other changes currently suggested/mooted include: Epiphany will be the default web-browser; AbiWord will be included in place of LibreOffice; no Ubuntu One by default; GNOME Classic session included (complete with Ubuntu's indicators); Rhythmbox (and its various music store plugins) will remain." An initial developer-only release called "Ubuntu GNOME Remix" is now available for download.

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The much-awaited alpha release of Fedora 18, already delayed by a week, suffered another setback last week when the developers decided it was still too buggy for release and subsequent testing by the general public. Jaroslav Reznik explains on the Test-Announce mailing list: "Today at go/no-go meeting it was decided to slip Fedora 18 alpha release by one week due to remaining open blocker bugs and incomplete test matrices for alpha. As a result, all major milestones and their dependent tasks will be pushed back by one week. The next go/no-go meeting is on Thursday, September 6. If you have an accepted blocker bug, please try to fix it as soon as possible to help us with Fedora 18 alpha release!" The final release of Fedora 18 has now been moved to 20 November 2012; see the project's schedule page for further details.

Tips and Tricks (by Jesse Smith)

Letting your server take naps

Do you have a server at home, a box which is idle most of the time, but which performs a single task once a day or once an hour? Maybe it only gets used at night for backups, or maybe it streams media during the day, but doesn't have anything to do at night. Perhaps it performs some minor task every hour and spends the other 59 minutes not doing much of anything. If this sounds familiar then it might have crossed your mind at some point that it would be nice if the server slept when it wasn't in use, reducing your electric bill and the amount of heat being pumped into the house.

The good news is it's not difficult to set up a Linux server so that it gets put into suspend mode for a set amount of time. This allows us to schedule tasks at predetermined intervals and leave the machine to rest the remainder of the time. To achieve this we will need two packages to be installed on the server. These are pm-utils and powermanagement-interface. We should also make sure the cron daemon is installed and running on our server. The next thing we need is a script which will tell Linux when in the future it should wake up and then put the system to sleep. Here is an example script which accepts a single parameter, the number of minutes the operating system should sleep before waking.

#!/bin/bash

# This script puts the system under sleep mode for N minutes
if [ $# -ne 1 ] ; then
echo "usage: $0 <minutes>"
echo "where <minutes> is the number of minutes to be asleep"
exit 0
fi

Once the above script is saved on the server we can put the machine to sleep by logging in and running the script. I called my script the unimaginative name "sleep_for_x_minutes" so to put my machine to sleep for an hour (60 minutes) I run:

sleep_for_x_minutes 60

Should we wish to have the server go to sleep at midnight and wake up at 7:00am, we could create a cron job in the /etc/crontab file which looks like this:

0 0 * * * root /home/myuser/sleep_for_x_minutes 420

This job puts the server to sleep at midnight, telling it to wake up again in 420 minutes (7 hours). We can add calls to our sleep_for_x_minutes script from other scripts. For example, if we want to ping another server once every hour we could tell our machine to sleep after doing its task:

Note I've only put the server to sleep for 55 minutes instead of an hour to give it some room for error. It wouldn't do to have the server oversleep and miss its next scheduled task.

Taking an approach like this, leaving the server in sleep mode when it is not being used, allows us to save electricity while automating the wake up and sleep cycle so we don't have to remember to power on (or off) the machine as it is needed. A word of warning though: make sure you have a way to wake up the machine in case you want to use it for other tasks. Usually it is a simple matter of pressing the computer's power button, but that's of little use if you are not in the same building, so only give your server naps if you are certain you can access it when you need it.

There may also be cases where we wish to put the server to sleep, but only when people are not using the machine. To deal with these sorts of situations I wrote an expanded version of the script. The script (shown below) will put the server to sleep for X number of minutes, but only when no one is logged in, there are no secure shell connections and no screen sessions are in progress. For each minute that passes and the machine is in use, one minute of sleep time is discarded. This means that if we want the server to sleep for 60 minutes, but someone is on-line for the first 20 of those minutes, then the server only sleeps for the remaining 40 minutes, insuring it wakes at the proper moment. The script is a bit crude, but it is laid out in a manner which should make it easy to add additional tests for FTP connections or other user activity.

#!/bin/bash

# This script puts the system under standby mode for x minutes
if [ $# -ne 1 ] ; then
echo "usage: $0 <minutes>"
echo "where <minutes> is the number of minutes to be on standby"
exit 0
fi

Turbolinux, Inc., one of the world's oldest surviving Linux companies, has announced the release of Turbolinux Client 12.5, a Japanese operating system for desktops and embedded systems. This is the first update of the distribution since the release of version 12 in November 2007 and, like its predecessor, it comes with extended support (three years of maintenance followed by four years of security support). Turbolinux 12.5 uses Linux kernel 3.1.10 and it includes KDE 3.5.9, X.Org Server 1.4.0.90, Firefox 14.0.1, Thunderbird 14.0 and more software found in the distribution's online repository, such as LibreOffice 3.5.5. Read the press release (in Japanese) for further information. A freely downloadable (and installable) live CD image of Turbolinux 12.5 is available from the project's download page (in Japanese), but users are encouraged to purchase the full version (¥9,300), which includes extra Japanese TrueType fonts and the Turbo media player.

Brian Manderville has announced the release of Descent|OS 3.0, an Ubuntu-based distribution featuring the MATE (a fork of GNOME 2) desktop environment: "I am pleased to announce that Descent|OS 3 is officially available for download. It is 32-bit only for now, but the PAE kernel is supported after install. In terms of cosmetics, Qt now looks right, and all the packages have been updated. The MATE desktop has been great to work with, and it is stable. It uses the 3.2 series kernel, and is based on Ubuntu 12.04. All the packages have been updated since the release candidate, and it behaves just the way I want it to. I have included a Beginner's Guide for new people to learn how to use Synaptic and the custom keyboard shortcuts." Here is the brief release announcement.

Jörg Schilling has announced the release of SchilliX 0.8, an OpenSolaris-based (text mode-only) live CD. What's new in the project's first release in nearly two years? "SchilliX is no longer based on Illumos as Illumos decided to go into a direction of a codebase that is mostly usable only for file servers and that is only supporting IPS packages. This is not compatible with pursuing Solaris ideas. As Illumos does not support SVr4 packages, we are forced to create a more generalized OpenSolaris source base continuation project. SchilliX is now based on an OpenSolaris continuation project (SchilliX-ON) which is free of company interests and which tries to continue with UNIX ideas. SchilliX-ON tries to be as POSIX and SVr5 compatible as possible. The SchilliX-ON base is available as compressed SVr4 packages that can be installed directly from the network using only 'pkgadd'." Read the rest of the release announcement for further information.

Liraz Siri has announced the release of TurnKey Linux 12.0, a library of Debian-based virtual appliances, integrating the best open-source software into ready-to-use solutions: "The 12.0 release is finally out after nearly 6 months of development and just in time to celebrate TurnKey's 4th anniversary. I'm proud to announce we've more than doubled the size of the TurnKey Linux library, from 45 appliances to over 100! So many innovations and competing ideas, all this free energy. We feel so privileged to have a front row seat and not just watch it all play out but also be able to play our own small role in showcasing so much high-quality open-source work while making it just a bit more accessible to users. Unlike previous releases this latest release is based on Debian, not Ubuntu. We realize this may upset hardcore Ubuntu fans but if you read on, I'll try to explain below why 'defecting' to Debian was the right thing for TurnKey." See the full release announcement and the project's virtual appliances page to learn more about the 106 ready-made solutions.

Daniel Drake has announced the release of OLPC OS 12.1.0, a Linux distribution created under the initiative of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project to provide children in developing countries with low-cost laptops: "We're pleased to announce the release of OLPC OS 12.1.0 for XO-1, XO-1.5 and XO-1.75. OLPC OS 12.1.0 is a new software release focusing on improving the XO-1.75 user experience, and undertaking a much-needed technological shift for Sugar's internals to GTK+ 3.x. Additionally, XO-1.5 and XO-1 continue to be supported in this release, and we include a variety of new features and fixes. Features: Sugar 0.96; transition of Sugar components to GTK+ 3; write to the journal any time; a new icon in the Sugar frame allows for any currently-selected text to be dictated by the internal speech engine; Browse, Wikipedia and Help have been moved from Mozilla to WebKit internally...." See the release announcement and release notes for further information.

Artyom Zorin has announced the release of Zorin OS 6.1 "Educational Lite" edition, a lightweight Lubuntu-based distribution specially created for deployment in schools: "The Zorin OS team has released Zorin OS 6.1 Educational Lite, the latest evolution of the Zorin OS Educational Lite series of operating systems, designed specifically for Windows users using old or low-powered hardware for educational purposes. This release is based on Lubuntu 12.04 and uses the LXDE desktop environment to provide one of the fastest and most feature-packed interfaces for low-specification machines. This new release includes updated software, the newer Linux kernel version 3.2, as well as other improvements. We also include lots of educational software for primary, secondary and tertiary education students." The release announcement.

Maxim Kammerer has announced the release of Liberté Linux 2012.3, an updated version of the project's Gentoo-based live CD distribution with strong Internet privacy features: "A new release has been published on SourceForge. In this release (notable user-visible changes): Linux kernel 3.4.7 with better hardware support (e.g., brcmsmac) and UnionFS replaced by OverlayFS, which is expected to be eventually accepted into mainline; EFI boot binaries are signed for Secure Boot (tested in OVMF), establishing a trusted boot chain starting with a KEK / DB certificate (located in EFI directory); X.Org Server 1.12 and Mesa 8.0 with Gallium3D for Radeon cards, nouveau driver for NVIDIA cards, and support for accelerated VMware graphics virtualization; simplified boot parameters handling -- most previous parameters are now omitted; added 'blacklist' boot parameter for blacklisting kernel modules from auto-loading...." Read the full release announcement for more details.

Bruce Dubbs has announced the release of Linux From Scratch (LFS) 7.2, a book of instructions on how to build a base Linux system from scratch by utilising an existing Linux system or a live CD: "The Linux From Scratch community is pleased to announce the release of LFS Version 7.2. It is a major release with toolchain updates to both glibc 2.16.0 and GCC 4.7.1. In total, 28 packages were updated from LFS 7.1 and changes to boot scripts and text have been made throughout the book." Other updates in this release include Linux kernel 3.5.2, GRUB 2.00, Perl 5.16.1, udev 188 (extracted from systemd 188), Coreutils 8.19 and most other GNU utilities, switch from module-init-tools to kmod. Visit the project's news page to read the release announcement.

Ikey Doherty has announced the release of SolusOS 2.1 "Legacy" edition, a Debian-based desktop Linux distribution with GNOME 2, released to address the needs of users with certain problematic hardware: "The SolusOS team is pleased to announce the release of SolusOS 1.2 Legacy. This is a maintenance release for the Eveline 1.x series. You can now download for 32-bit PAE or non-PAE, or 64-bit computers. This legacy release brings support for users of older chipsets or problematic hardware (such as nForce, Broadcom, etc.). Brief overview of software versions: Firefox 15.0, Thunderbird 15.0, LibreOffice 3.6.0, Linux kernel 3.0, iptables 1.4.8, ufw 0.31.1, hplip 3.12, VLC 2.0.1, Pidgin 2.10, GNOME 2.30. Many new applications are available in the software repository." Read the rest of the release announcement for more information.

Launched in 2004, this monthly donations programme is a DistroWatch initiative to support free and open-source software projects and operating systems with cash contributions. Readers are welcome to nominate their favourite project for future donations. Those readers who wish to contribute towards these donations, please use our advertising page to make a payment (PayPal and credit cards are accepted). Here is the list of the projects that have received a DistroWatch donation since the launch of the programme (figures in US dollars):